A Conversation with Saba Keramati

by Celina Simone

I first encountered Saba Keramati’s work when I googled “iranian american poet.” Growing up in the South, I had never seen those words together, but stepping into the world of publications, and lit mags, and by-lines, I wanted to see someone like me who was doing it. I needed proof that when I wrote about my culture, people would want to read it.

The first poem of hers I read was “Rosewater for New Year’s” (published in the Whale Road Review). I had never seen the words like samovar or Norooz in writing. The writing was intimate and delicate, and made me feel like the two of us were in on a special, Farsi-filled, inside joke. The more I wrote, the more I read her work. It moved away and back to the intimacy that comes with writing in a language few can understand. It got more exciting, more personal, and—most importantly—more political. Her work embraces the multilinguality every child of immigrants is all too familiar with, referencing Duolingo, monolingual teachers, and how words like “America” change with every generation that comes and goes through its borders. Reading Keramati’s poems gave me permission to stop thinking about “the audience” and start thinking about the message; about the “why” behind the pieces of Farsi I incorporated beside my English verse.

I thought it was only fitting to reach out to her for an interview to celebrate this special issue of Aster Lit, and her newest book Self-Mythology.

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Celina Simone: So first off, I wanted to say congrats for your new collection of poetry Self-Mythology, published during the Miller Williams Poetry Series at the University of Arkansas press. That's really exciting. I was wondering if maybe you want to share a little bit about your newest book.

Saba Keramati: Sure. Thank you so much. So my book is called Self-Mythology. It has been out for a couple months now, and it is really a book that focuses on multiraciality and the speaker. It's really hard to say, “The Speaker vs. Me,” when the speaker and I share many, many identity factors. One in particular, the speaker's parents coming from two different countries to America as this “safe haven,” and the speaker growing up in the times that we are living in today, kind of thinking about: “What that heritage means in current, in contemporary America?”

Celina Simone: Could you elaborate on these identity factors? What you kind of read as an identity factor?

Saba Keramati: So specifically, this book is a lot about race. My father is from Iran, and my mother is from China. Both of them left their countries and moved to California after political upheaval in those home countries.

Celina Simone: You touch on this idea of a home a lot in so much of your work. I think even on your website, you have this really beautiful quote that says, “Is this self a home? What does a home mean for the speaker, a daughter of immigrants, when American colonialism has wreaked havoc on their parents’ countries?” So how do you think language factors into that idea of a home?

Saba Keramati: Yeah, that's a great question. I think, for this book, poetry becomes a kind of home for the speaker, especially the opening poem, which is kind of written in this braid of like Chinese on one side, Farsi on the left, or like the mother's background on one side, the father's background on the other. It’s about the speaker's experience landing in the middle of that. The language used in that poem, and throughout the collection, is really kind of about how one makes sense of the world around them and how one looks at themselves, versus like being other-ized from other people. So language kind of becomes a like a source of power for the speaker, because she's able to communicate her feelings and her own experiences and identities in the way that she wants them to be, versus, like being told ‘you are XYZ.’

Celina Simone: I love that idea of seeing kind of the language you speak and the language of your parents as a source of power, because I think a really common theme in a lot of ‘diaspora poetry’ is [the idea that] when you can't fluently speak the language of your parents, you are essentially failing as a child of immigrants. So, why do you think language is kind of seen as that metric of your connection to your culture? Why do we, out of all the traditions—out of all the parts of our culture—we see language as like this metric of whether or not you are connected to your community?

Saba Keramati: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that language kind of shapes the way we react to the world. I think about the word ‘sentimentality’ a lot, and how something being sentimental can be seen as a negative thing in American society or in English. It's corny, it's cheesy. But I definitely never thought of sentimentality as a bad thing. I think in Farsi and Iranian culture, there's a lot of earnestness there. So when I had to look up definitions of things as I was reading and learning a larger vocabulary, I interpreted them differently because of [my culture] or [how] I was raised. Your language is part of your building blocks. When you're learning how to become a person as a baby, you learn to walk and you talk, and that's pretty much what gets you through life. And so the way that you talk is influenced by who's around you and what cultures you're being raised in. So I think when people of diaspora think of not knowing their parents’ language as a failure, I wouldn't call it a failure, but I would say I understand the desire to be more entrenched in a language because it makes you more entrenched in a culture.

Celina Simone: You brought up the way sentimentality is interpreted through different cultures. It's something that gets translated and is oftentimes lost in translation. And in a lot of your work you kind of tackle this idea that the feeling or the emotional value of the “American Dream” is also lost in translation between generations. You have this great poem, “There is No Other Way to Say This.” You say the “this” in three different languages. You say, “I do not sing America and I do not want to // 妈妈, I know all you gave up for this // بابا, I know it scares you to hear this.” How do you think the [phrase] ‘American Dream’ has kind of changed throughout generations, especially within communities created by children of immigrants?

Saba Keramati: I think that there is this idea of the American Dream, of what it represents for people who don't live here. Like, ‘you can do anything. You can come to the country with no money and work your way up to the top of a corporate ladder and get rich and all these things.’ And I don't even think that's what my parents were really looking for, not that looking for that is bad, but I think for my parents, when they came here, it was because they were losing a lot of opportunities in their home countries. That was because of the political atmosphere, things like censorship, oppression, and what you're allowed to teach in school. They came here, and they had to watch me grow up like especially in the wake of 9/11 and see some of the same things started happening here. So when my parents were young and thinking of America, it represented possibility. But I think that for a lot of people of my generation and who have experienced some of the same things that they did in terms of censorship, all of a sudden America kind of represents negative connotations. And that's not to say that the positive connotations don't exist. I do have a poem in my book that says, “I still live here.”

I'm not so destitute that I wouldn't be able to move somewhere else if I really wanted to. But immigration is hard, and there are things that I really like about my life. So then it becomes a reckoning of like, “Okay, what am I grateful for versus what am I resenting of this country"?” It's hard to balance those two when you know that your parents wouldn't have even been able to meet if it wasn't for this country.

Celina Simone: During our conversation you've touched so much on the connotation of “America.” What it means to be an other here. Do you think being in this country contributes to the languages you use in your poetry, and your relationship with those languages?

Saba Keramati: Yeah, I do. I think that when I hold Farsi or when I hold Mandarin, I try really hard to make it feel true to me. I can't write essays in Farsi or Chinese. I know that about myself. I'm not gonna say that I've never used Google Translate. I have. So I do try really hard not to use entire sentences or words that I would not use naturally.

When I grew up, I grew up speaking all three languages, and so it would be kind of like a disservice if I never referenced any language other than English. Even when they're not directly tied to my mother's immigration or my father's asylee status, they're still part of my life.

Celina Simone: Hearing you speak about multilinguality and reading your work makes the experience feel [almost] like a mosaic—your work really helps the reader feel what it’s like to navigate through multiple languages. In some poems it feels very effortless, and then in some poems it feels very vulnerable. In your poem “In a Dream I Speak Perfect Mandarin,” you compare learning and speaking Mandarin to waves and bees. Do you see your relationship with speaking Mandarin, Farsi, and English [as] something that can be volatile like those objects? Or does writing about and using all three languages unify them for you?

Saba Keramati: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that the more I use it in my poetry, the more comfortable I get with it. So I will say specifically for Mandarin I have a really hard time like understanding native Chinese speakers’ accents when they speak in Chinese. It would be really hard for me to enter a space where everything being spoken is [in] Chinese. And in that sense, there's a bit of volatility in that I know when I don't know enough, and I sometimes do feel like I should know more. But I think that the more I use it—and the more I get accustomed to it and practice the same way I would as if I were learning it for the first time—the more comfortable I get using it in my poetry. And I've also [gotten] comfortable with the idea of using it. When I first started writing poetry, I didn't like to use my parents’ languages at all because I was like, ‘The reader might not be able to read them,’ and ‘I don't know how their experience is going to be reading this poem, because they might not know the languages, and maybe if they don't, it'll mess up their interpretation of the poem.’ But I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the idea that the reader might not understand every single word. And that's okay.

Celina Simone: I think a lot of young writers [are] first beginning to step into this realm of: “Maybe I'm going to try to do some something multilingual. Maybe I am going to write to my culture.” And in your work it feels like you’re always doing that with such a complex consideration of your audience. So many poems reference your childhood and communicate to your reader the way you communicate to your parents inside your household. How different that is from the way you communicate to the rest of the world? Why do you think it's important to you, as a multilingual writer, to highlight these experiences for your reader?

Saba Keramati: Good question. In Self-Mythology, I think the idea of a home is really important. The speaker’s first home is this apartment that is just her, her mom and her dad, right? I'm an only child; home and the people that I was conversing with for most of my life [were] people [who] understood me, people who are able to hold multiple languages at once. But I think once you move out of your family home, into home as it exists in the context of everything around you, it starts to look different. That's when you realize, ‘Oh, not everybody is doing the same things as me. Not everybody has the same understanding of my language and my ability to see the world.’

Celina Simone: Does that ever worry you? That words or experiences encapsulated in your work may be lost in translation as they reach a larger, broader, possibly ‘more-American’ audience?

Saba Keramati: I will say that I think about that, but I don't worry about that. I've gotten very okay with my audience not being typical white America. And that's not to say all of white America wouldn’t be able to read it, it's just more like I've gotten very okay with the idea that I'm not shy about my opinions. And so if someone's going to disagree with them and be offended or confused by what's in the book, then that's not really who the book's for, and that's okay. I didn't write it for them.

Celina Simone: I love the confidence. Do you have any advice for maybe some of [the] younger writers in our audience who are beginning to step into this space [of] ‘I do want to write about my culture, and I do want to have the confidence to do that in a really authentic way’ without relying on—well, I know the biggest stereotype right now is: if you have an immigrant mom, at one point in your literary career you're going to write about her cutting fruit. You're going to write about like, this disconnection between you and her. But I think a lot of young writers are beginning to wake up and realize, ‘Maybe I don't have to write about my culture and my language from this point of view of tragedy and loss, and I want to write about it with such a sense of beauty.’ What is your advice for young writers [who are] like, ‘There are different ways that I can write about my culture.’

Saba Keramati: Yeah, I love that question. I have a poem in my book where both of my parents cut fruit, so I'm not to say ‘that's something I’m above and that you should never do that.’ Or, you know, ‘never put a mango in a poem.’ ‘Never put a pomegranate in a poem.’ Those things are used, and they have specific contexts. They do mean things, and so if they are really important to you, keep them. But I would ask myself this: is that true to your experience, or is it something that you've been conditioned to think is supposed to be a part of your experience? Like, my mom wasn't a tiger mom—she was a Chinese mom, but she was not a tiger mom. She did send me to math tutoring, but she was not mean, and she didn't hold grades as the utmost importance—[which is] a trope we see a lot in a lot of Chinese American lit, right? I was going to write about that, it would just ring really hollow, because it's not true. If I wrote a poem about how much going to math tutoring upset me, it would feel like it's full of tropes, because I wouldn't be drawing on a real experience. I would be drawing on like, what I've seen of other Chinese American diaspora kids writing.

I would ask yourself: What's what's unique about your experiences in diaspora and what's shared? Don't only focus on what's shared. Think about what isn't shared and how that makes it more interesting, in a way, because you're showing the breadth of what's possible within a community.

Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her debut poetry collection, Self-Mythology, was selected by Patricia Smith for publication in the Miller Williams Poetry Series at University of Arkansas Press, and is forthcoming in Spring 2024. A winner of the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Prize, Saba holds an MFA from UC Davis, where she was a Dean’s Graduate Fellow for Creative Arts. She is the Poetry Editor at Sundog Lit.